This story of a woman's bravery during the Sepoy rebellion reveals much about Good Words and the real sincerity of Victorian religion. Hester, whose little boy has just died from illness, finds herself the source of strength for the panicked woman and children surrounding her. [continued below]

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Shortly after she discovers her own husband
has been murdered by his mutinous troops, she finds herself standing with
“shrieking, appalled women . . . huddling around her;
and as the inhuman strife began, and the rattle of
artillery was heard at the barricades thrown up on
the dreadful spur of the moment, these maddened
women grew madder.” Interesting and perhaps
characteristic of a story in religiously oriented magazine, the
author presents the women not as martyrs but as women
who came to India for an easy, luxurious lives:

They had come out of England for a very different fate; for many humble servants and much easy luxury, for dressing and
driving and visiting ad libitum. Not to the wilds
of Africa had they come; not as missionary women
to the islands of the Pacific, ready to spend and be
spent, and, if need be, to enter heaven wearing the
pale crown of martyrdom. But many of them (God
knows, not all) were gay women — thoughtless and
soft young girls, or proud and defiant ones, who had
boasted nothing should move them — and see, their
challenge is awfuUy taken up, and they are weighed
in the grim balance and found wanting. They forgot
Mrs. Durham's higher rank and reticence, in the
present hour of common danger. They even forgot
the sacredness of her recent widowhood, and her
husband's blood fresh spilt at her gate.

They clung around Hester, where she stood like a
rock in a stonny sea. One passionate girl, bold in
her approach to the last, clutched her shawl; one
devoted mother thrust her baby into those passive
aims, empty of children of their own. They clamoured
to her, they all but prayed to her to save
them, so struck were the whole terrified band with
the silent strength of her composure — so inevitably
did every living creature there elect the calm woman
their leader and guide, that even a little whining
dog came and crouched at her feet.

That little dog is a very Victorian touch, one that appears in countless genre paintings, but this short story about the Indiana Mutiny of 1857
ends with no rescue. Instead, Hester, who has been living
until now without a purpose, tells the panicked women:

Christ died for you; and my boy Roger died smiling
with love for Him, and I tell you the tale."

Over and over again she preached that sermon,
with the light of Heaven growing brighter and
broader on her face. Her hearers did not tire of
listening to the few simple words. The bold girl
behind her burst into tears of penitence and
ravished love, and laid her head on her sister's
shoulder; the fainting woman's relaxed hands re-
covered hold, and tremblingly grasped her skirt.
The baby on her lap smiled, and stretched up its
dimpled hands to her beautiful, inspired face. The
very little dumb dog nestled, as if in peace, beside
her.

At this point the author tells her readers, “A mist comes over the group, a silence settles on
the tumult,” after which she asks “Were they
saved by a miracle of gallantry and bravery,” did
the “one poor bungalow hold out,” or did the
women and children escape to eventual safety? Tytler
rather pulls the rug out from under the reader, announcing
bluntly, “They did not,” and she continues
that rescue wouldn't have been a more “blessed a fate” once Hester's words had
“caught and melted” these poor women.
In fact, she concludes, these “poor women and little children went up within the
hour in a fiery chariot, spanned by the bow of
Christ's love, straight to God's mercy-seat.” Hester here in her final hours found something to live for just as her life came to a close. She saved others.

Unlike most fictional and nonfictional narratives of the Indian Mutiny, particularly those written by men, Tytler's pays very little attention to the mutinous troops and certainly doesn't call for revenge. She doesn't even present the colonizers favorably. Instead, like many Victorian evangelicals, she emphasizes a blessed death — one that comes at a moment one one is in a state of belief. She achieves her goals of turning our attention away from the agents of destruction and toward the dead women and children's scent to heaven by avoiding the word “death” itself and instead describing what was obviously a massacre of women and children as an ascent in something like Elijah's fiery chariot.